I want to Freaky Friday with Shantel Tessier!

Daily writing prompt

If you could be someone else for a day, who would you be, and why?

We all spend a crazy amount of time comparing ourselves to others. The idiom ‘the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence‘ is one of the truest things ever said. You couldn’t pay me enough money to switch places with a Kardashian. Fuck being a Taylor Swift or J-Lo. No amount of money in the world is worth the constant scrutiny they live under. And those batshit bitches do it on purpose!

Since the day I decided to try my hand at writing professionally, my goal has been for my books to find the right readers and hit it big. I think that’s probably everyone’s goal when they get into publishing. But what if it happens? What if my books do hit it big?

That thought has continued to cause me anxiety for years. I want the pudding but the all the sprinkles that come with the pudding also scare the absolute shit out of me. Sure, it means far fewer money struggles. Omg, I would love to have just enough money to not worry about bills every month, but not so much money that everyone in the world knows who I am. I’m not greedy. I’d be perfectly happy with marginal success. I wouldn’t want the problems of the people I admire. The ones I have are more than enough.

That being said, if we’re suspending reality and the anxieties of adulthood, I would love to swap places with any of the writers I admire, but I would want to be inside their head as an observer. I only know what it’s like to live inside my own ADHD brain. I’d be curious to see what it’s like in theirs. Do they have a simple, straightforward train of thought that’s easy to keep up with? Or do they also have an overcrowded platform with eight-hundred tracks, no brakes, and one conductor who may or may not be on mushrooms? I once spent a Saturday following along on Twitter as Anne Rice wrote forty-seven pages in a new book (if I remember correctly, it was The Wolves of Midwinter but don’t hold me to that). I was floored by how other writers can just sit down and pour it out. Before I begin writing, I have to outline, outline, outline.

If I were to swap places with someone right this second, it would probably be Shantel Tessier. If you’re not familiar, she’s a bestselling author of dark contemporary romance (really border lining horror) and I am a massive fan. Make no mistake, her books have spicy spice in them (and lots of it) but the thing that makes her work so impressive is the secret society world she’s built out. It’s vast, twisted, and would be a terrifying place to live. Each book in her L.O.R.D.S. world is a standalone dark romance and each one is longer than the last. The shortest book in that series is 174,000 words and if I remember correctly, she said her most recent novel, Madness, is 224,000 words long. I’ve read every single one and will re-read them many times over. Every time I crack the cover on one of her novels, I’m struck by how this gigantic world she’s crafted keeps growing exponentially bigger and more impressive. I would love to spend a day inside her head while she’s working on the next novel in that world.